SHOULD 

STUDENT 
STUDY 



FO 




Class i B 

Book ^ ,. „ 

&pJght"N?.-_-, 

CflWRIGRT DEPOSITS 



SHOULD STUDENTS 
STUDY? 



SHOULD STUDENTS 
STUDY? 



BY 
William Trtjfant Foster, LL.D. 

President of Reed College 




HARPER fef BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 



•Ft 



f 0; ; 5 



1:7 1917 



Should Students Study 



Copyright, 1917. by Harper & Brothers 

Printed in the United States of America 

Published March, 1917 



©CW455913 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. . PAGE 

I. College Life 3 

II. Differences — East and West .... 13 

III. College Life and College Studies . . 19 

IV. Promise and Performance 23 

V. Success in Studies and in Life ... 32 

VI. Genius as a Substitute for Study . . 47 

VII. Thinking by Proxy 58 

VIII. Should Specialists Specialize? ... 75 

IX. Ultimately Practical Studies .... 82 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/qletails/shouldstudentsstOOfost 



PART I 



SHOULD STUDENTS 
STUDY? 



COLLEGE LIFE 

" T"^\0 not let your studies interfere with 
-L/ your college education." This motto 
adorns the walls of many a student's room. 
It is his semi-humorous way of expressing 
his semi-conviction that studies do not count 
— that the thing to go in for is "College 
Life." This thing, made up of intercol- 
legiate athletics and lesser diversions, looms 
large in the student's mind. This frequenter 
of college walks and halls and tombs and 
grand stands I call a "student" for want of 

3 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

a safer term, though it sometimes does him 
injustice. He has sundry answers to the 
question whether students should study. 

Not Merely an Academic Question 

In academic circles this is not merely an 
academic question. The boy who goes to 
college faces it, in one form or another, again 
and again. Indeed, before he dons his 
freshman togs his mother tells him not to 
study too hard, and his father gives him to 
understand that deficiencies in scholarship, 
which do not end his college career, will be 
overlooked if he makes the football team. 
He observes the boys who return from col- 
lege; he finds that their language and their 
clothes bear marks of a higher education. 
He hears accounts of initiations and cele- 
brations. His chum's big brother takes him 
aside and tells him confidentially just how he 
must conduct himself in order to be rushed 
for the right fraternity. Everybody tells 
him he must be a "good fellow"; few dis- 
course upon the joys of the curriculum. 
Whether students should study may remain 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

with him an open question, but he begins to 
doubt whether students do study. 

With his mind set on going to college, he 
reads all that comes to hand on the subject. 
The newspapers give him vivid details of 
the games, big and little, with full-page 
pictures of the heroes. They report night- 
shirt parades, student riots, dances, beer- 
nights — anything but studies. Now and 
then they do give space to a professor, if he 
has been indiscreet, or has appeared to say 
something scandalous which everybody in 
college knows he did not say, or if he is sued 
for divorce. They even spare him an inch 
or two if he is awarded a Nobel prize. 

The lad reads stories of College Life. 
How they glow with escapades! His mind 
becomes a moving picture of thrilling es- 
capes, of goats enthroned on professorial 
chairs, of freshies ducked in chilling waters, 
of battalions of rooters yelling with the pre- 
cision of a cash-register. Now and then 
there is mention of lectures and examina- 
tions, for it appears that the sophisticated 
youth knows many devices for "getting by" 

5 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

these impediments to the unalloyed enjoy- 
ment of College Life. Surely the high-school 
teacher who spoke with such enthusiasm 
about the lectures of "Old Socrates" must 
be hopelessly behind the times. Surely no- 
body goes to college nowadays for lectures. 

After entering college the boy continues 
his studies in the philosophy of education 
under the tutelage of a sophomore. His tu- 
tor informs him that the object of education 
is the all-round man. The faculty and the 
curriculum, he explains, are obstacles, but 
the upper classes rescue the poor freshman 
from pentagonal and other primitive shapes 
and round him out with smokers, hazing, 
initiations, jamborees, and visits to the big 
city, where he makes the acquaintance of 
drinks and ladies far more brilliant-hued 
than those of his somber native town. He 
is told that he is "seeing life," and that 
college will make an all-round man of him 
yet, if the faculty do not interfere with his 
education. 

If this sophomoric philosophy leaves any 
doubts to puzzle the freshman, they may be 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

cleared away by the alumni who return to 
warm up the fraternity-house with stories of 
the good old days. And, of course, the lad 
joins a fraternity before giving his course of 
study a thought. For what is college to a 
non-fraternity man? Merely an institution 
of learning. To the man with the Greek- 
lettered pin the fraternity is the sine qua non 
of higher education, the radiant whole of 
which the college is a convenient part, pro- 
viding for the fraternity a local habitation. 

And so the undergraduate stretches his 
legs before the hearth and hears the wisdom 
of the "Old Grad." In his day, it seems, 
things were different. The students were not 
such mollycoddles, the beer flowed more free- 
ly, and the faculty did not try to run things. 
No, sir, in the good old days the faculty did 
not spoil College Life. What a glorious 
celebration after that 56 to game, when 
every window in old West Hall was broken 
and the stoves were thrown down-stairs! 

"I tell you, boys," cried the "Old Grad," 
warming his feet by the fire and his imagina- 
tion by the wonder of the freshmen, "it is 

7 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

not what you learn in your classes that 
counts. It is the College Life. Books, lec- 
tures, recitations — you will forget all that. 
Nobody cares after you graduate whether 
you know any Latin or algebra, unless you 
are a teacher, and no man can afford to be 
a teacher nowadays. But you will remem- 
ber the College Life as long as you live." 

Some of the alumni would have a differ- 
ent story to tell, no doubt, but they do not 
get back often for fraternity initiations. 
Perhaps they are too busy. And again, they 
may have been nothing but "grinds" during 
their college days. 

The Respectable Grade of Mediocrity 

Whatever we may think of the "Old 
Grad's" remarks, the idea does prevail in 
many a college that the most important en- 
terprises are found in the side-shows, con- 
ducted by the students themselves, while the 
faculty present more or less buncombe per- 
formances in the main tent. Woodrow Wil- 
son said something to this effect before he 
gave up trying to make boys take their 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

studies seriously in favor of an easier job. 
Dean Fine said to the alumni of Princeton 
University: "The typical boy entering a col- 
lege like Princeton in these days is much 
more vitally interested in other boys and in 
sports than in books. To him the lure of 
college is not in its studies, but in its life." 
Professor Churchman of Clark College re- 
gards success in athletics and the social life 
of the college as "the honest ambition of an 
appalling proportion of fathers and mothers 
who are sending their sons to fashionable 
colleges, in the same spirit that accom- 
panies their daughters to fashionable finish- 
ing-schools." One father, whose son tri- 
umphed on the gridiron and failed in his 
studies, said to the dean of Harvard College, 
"My son's life has been just what I wanted 
it to be." 

In 1903 a committee of the Harvard fac- 
ulty, after extensive investigation, found 
that the average amount of study was 
"discreditably small." The committee de- 
clared that there was "too much teaching 
and not enough study," and that ambitious 

9 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

students find little incentive to take honors. 
The following year another committee re- 
ported that the student body did not re- 
gard grades in college courses as any test 
of ability. In 1908 still another committee 
came to this conclusion: "Contentment 
with mediocrity is perhaps the greatest dan- 
ger that faces us, and it is closely connect- 
ed with the feeling among the students that 
college is a sort of interlude in serious life, 
separated from what goes before and dis- 
sociated from what follows." A large ma- 
jority of seniors at Harvard expressed this 
belief in response to a questionnaire, and 
students elsewhere have expressed the con- 
viction in a score of ways. 

Many students look upon scholarship as 
a menial servant in the household of College 
Life, tolerated for a time in order that the 
abode may be free to welcome its convivial 
guests. They regard the social light of the 
fraternity and the hero of the gridiron as 
the most promising candidates for success in 
life. The valedictorian appears to them too 

confined in his interests to meet successfully 
10 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

anything beyond the artificial tasks of the 
class-room. He — poor fellow! — is supposed 
to be doomed to failure in real life. Where- 
fore the respectability of "The Gentleman's 
Grade" — the sign of mediocrity in scholar- 
ship. Wherefore the epithet "grind/' with 
its superlative "greasy grind," which sums 
up the contempt of the "good fellow" for 
the man who makes hard study his chief col- 
legiate interest. 

In many a student group the boy who 
thus speeds up and passes his fellows is 
treated as a "scab." And in many a fac- 
ulty group the idea seems to be: 

'Tis better to have come and loafed 
Than never to have come at all. 

Such ideas find fertile ground in high 
schools, and the seed spreads even to the 
virgin soil of the kindergarten. The new 
tree of life — the painless education, by the 
do-what-you-please, when-you-please, how- 
you-please method — is said to have been im- 
ported from Italy. It may have acquired 
11 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

only its label abroad, after the fashion of im- 
ported wines. Certainly its foliage is much 
like our native stock of the American college 
variety. 

Even upon the correspondence schools are 
grafted some branches of the tree of College 
Life. It is said that a father in Hood River, 
Oregon, found his son standing on his head 
in the crotch of an apple-tree, waving his 
legs in the air and giving a college yell. 

"Come down, boy," he cried. "Are you 
crazy r 

"No, father; leave me alone," said he. 
"I have just started my correspondence- 
school course, and the sophomores have 
written me to go andliaze myself." 



II 

DIFFERENCES— EAST AND WEST 

THERE are differences among the col- 
leges, to be sure. Let us admit that 
before we go further, so that any one may 
feel free to make such exceptions as his 
knowledge or his loyalty seems to warrant. 
The idea that College Life in "caps" should 
be the text, with studies as a foot-note, has 
not gripped all institutions with the same 
force. In some the idea seems to be a settled 
conviction; in others, little more than a 
suspicion. 

I have visited a hundred or more colleges, 
from the University of Maine in the North- 
east to the University of Redlands in the 
Southwest. I have learned what I could 
from the oldest university at Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, and from the youngest at 

13 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

Houston, Texas. Along twenty-five thou- 
sand miles of travel, I have tried to deter- 
mine, from what students say and do, to 
what extent they deem study worth the 
effort. Their estimates vary. 

Colleges cannot be readily classified on 
the basis of the earnestness of purpose 
with which students greet the curriculum. 
It does not appear that State universities 
stand higher or lower in this regard than 
privately supported institutions. Nor are 
there class distinctions of this kind between 
small and large colleges, between sectarian 
and non-sectarian colleges, or even between 
universities with millions of endowment and 
those endowed with poverty and hopes. 
There appears to be a difference between 
schools of the East and schools of the West; 
but other generalizations, though frequently 
made by overzealous friends of particular 
schools, appear to be based on too few cases. 

I am speaking, always, of the central 
tendencies of groups — of the mode, as so- 
ciologists would say, and not of the few 

extreme cases in the surface of distribution. 
14 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

Nearly every college has its distinctive feat- 
ure, which balks classification. One might 
conclude, from the studiousness of the boys 
at the College of the City of New York, 
that large, free, urban universities are the 
usual resorts of serious-minded youth. Such 
a conclusion would ignore the racial factor, 
more important in this instance than any 
other. The intellectual achievements of 
older graduates of Williams and Bowdoin 
and Amherst appear to make out a strong 
case for the small, sectarian, New England 
country college. But a generation or two 
ago there were no large, free, urban institu- 
tions. Evidence is not available sufficient 
to prove that the recent graduates of the 
small country colleges have finer intellectual 
enthusiasms than the recent graduates of 
any other group of colleges. Conclusions 
based on the spirit of a generation ago are 
usually misleading as present-day guides. 
Such conclusions may or may not be mis- 
leading in this case. American colleges 
changed vitally during the past generation, 
and a few are changing rapidly to-day. 

15 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

With these qualifications I venture one 
generalization: students of the younger 
Western colleges are more worthy of the 
name than those of the older Eastern col- 
leges. They come through greater sacrifices 
and with more serious purposes. This is 
what history tells us to expect of the frontier. 
It is, moreover, the usual report of those who 
have taught in the East and in the West. 
Eagerness for knowledge is one manifesta- 
tion of the enthusiasm of youth in a young 
country. In many of the older seats of 
learning, responsiveness to the efforts of 
instructors is in bad form. To do more than 
the assigned lesson, or to tarry after the 
lecture for more help, is to risk one's reputa- 
tion. "Harvard indifference" is not Har- 
vard indifference; it is the attitude toward 
studies of young men anywhere who go to 
college as a matter of course, with no domi- 
nant purpose beyond the desire to enjoy 
College Life. They find that there is little 
in it; even their interest in intercollegiate 
athletics has to be coaxed by rallies and or- 
ganized into cheers. They find out that a 

16 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

man who has nothing to do but amuse himself 
has a hard job. Spontaneous delight over 
anything is not to be expected. To increase 
in years and in resources and yet retain the 
splendid enthusiasm of poverty and youth 
appears to be as difficult for institutions as 
for men and women. 

Yet so rapidly are colleges changing that 
conditions seem to pass away under our very 
scrutiny. The West of to-day is a new West. 
Even the far West is already a long genera- 
tion beyond frontier days. The colleges are 
keeping pace with the country, not only in 
material prosperity, but in spirit and in ideals. 
A larger proportion of the families are well- 
to-do, and a larger proportion of boys and 
girls resort to higher schools. Growth begets 
the desire to grow. Numbers seem necessary 
for winning games and impressing legisla- 
tures. College expenses grow, too. Easier 
communication with Eastern universities 
leads to further imitation. Thus sturdy 
Western institutions of pioneer days tend to 
lose their individuality. They reveal signs 
of what they call progress. They not only 

17 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

standardize their units of admission, but also 
their ideals. They tend to become intel- 
lectual democracies and social aristocracies; 
in the beginning they were quite the reverse. 
The change has not gone so far in the West 
— certainly not in the private colleges of the 
West — but the direction is unmistakable. 

Again, let me say, I speak in terms of 
group tendencies; exceptions leap to mind 
with every statement. 



Ill 

COLLEGE LIFE AND COLLEGE STUDIES 

THE students have given us their own 
word for it that College Life is more im- 
portant than college studies; but Professor 
Gayley of the University of California calls 
this worshiping the idol of Incidental Issues. 
"As if character were worth anything 
without mind, and were any other, as 
President Wilson has wisely said, than the 
by-product of duty performed; or that the 
duty of the student were any other than to 
study. They accept the fallacy that the 
gauge of studentship is popularity, and that 
popularity during academic years is to be 
won by hasty achievement and the babbling 
strenuous life, by allegiance to a perverted 
image of the Alma Mater, by gregariousness, 
by playing at citizenship. Of this popularity 

19 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

the outward and visible index is mundane 
prominence and the lightly proffered laurel 
of the campus." 

President Hyde further expressed the 
common idea of college teachers when he 
said, in an address to freshmen: "Put your 
studies first; and that for three reasons: 
first, you will have a better time in college. 
Hard work is a necessary background for 
the enjoyment of everything else. Second, 
after the first three months you will stand 
better with your fellows. At first there will 
appear to be cheaper roads to distinction, 
but their cheapness is soon found out. 
Scholarship alone will not give you the 
highest standing with your fellows; but you 
will not get their highest respect without 
showing that you can do well something 
that is intellectually difficult. Third, your 
future career depends upon it." 

But does your future career really depend 
upon it? That question may w T ell be an- 
swered by college faculties with something 
more than their opinions. On this subject 

teachers are regarded as prejudiced au- 
20 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

thorities. They are supposed to believe in 
the importance of their own jobs. They 
may exhort students to study on the ground 
that success in undergraduate studentship 
leads to the kind of achievement that men 
desire in the life beyond Commencement. 
But boys think they know better. 

Is high scholarship worth the effort? In 
other words, have colleges devised courses of 
study which bear any relation to the probable 
careers of their students? Is there any ev- 
idence that a man who attains high marks 
is more likely to achieve success after gradua- 
tion than a man who is content with passing 
marks? 

If there is any such connection between 
success in studies and success in life, it 
should be possible to measure it by approved 
statistical methods, and thus arrive at con- 
clusions of more value as guidance to the 
undergraduate than the opinion of any man. 
Both the professor and the sport are in 
danger of arguing from exceptional in- 
stances — each is likely to find striking 
cases in proof of his preconceived notions; 

21 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

each is inclined to scorn the opinion of the 
other. 

But conclusions drawn from large numbers 
of cases, not subject to invalidating processes 
of selection, and employing terms that are 
adequately defined for the purpose at hand, 
must command the respect of all men. If 
such conclusions do not support the con- 
tention that it pays to study, there is some- 
thing radically wrong with the professor's 
part of college affairs; different kinds of 
achievement should receive academic dis- 
tinction and new tests should be devised. 
If, on the other hand, present standards 
for rating students predict their future suc- 
cess with any degree of accuracy, the facts 
should be discovered and used everywhere to 
combat the prevalent undergraduate opinion. 
Whatever the outcome of such studies, we 
should have them in larger numbers, in 
many places, protected by every safeguard 
of scientific method. We may well ask, first, 
whether promise in the studies of one period 
becomes performance in the studies of a later 
period. 

22 



IV 

PROMISE AND PERFORMANCE 

A RE good students in high school more 
JLjL likely than others to become good 
students in college? Prof. Walter F. Dear- 
born tried to answer that question for the 
State of Wisconsin. He compared the rec- 
ords of hundreds of students at the Univer- 
sity of Wisconsin with their records in various 
high schools. He found that above 80 
per cent, of those who were in the first 
quarter of their high-school classes remained 
in the upper half of their classes throughout 
the four years of their university course, and 
that above 80 per cent, of those who were 
in the lowest quarter in their high-school 
classes failed to rise above the line of mediocre 
scholarship in the university. The parallel- 
ism is so striking that we are justified in con- 

23 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

eluding that, except in scattering cases, 
promise in the high school becomes perform- 
ance in the college. Indeed, only one student 
out of nearly five hundred in this investiga- 
tion who fell among the lowest quarter in the 
high school attained the highest rank in the 
university. 

Such evidence has led Chancellor Edward 
C.Elliott, of Montana, to assert that although 
"the world may not value highly school 
'marks,' the fact remains, nevertheless, that 
only a specious skepticism would deny that 
there was no correlation between secondary, 
school success and college success. At any 
rate, in Wisconsin, there seems to be a demon- 
strable and positive relationship between the 
valuation of abilities of pupils while in high 
school and in university." 

"These facts," concludes Professor Dear- 
born, "effectively dispose of the notion that 
students in any great numbers do differently 
in scholarship in the university from what 
they do in the high school. There is little 
or no foundation in the facts thus adduced 
for the belief, cherished most frequently 

24 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

perhaps by the less successful and indif- 
ferent students of the high school, that the 
bright pupils often 'fag out' or find that the 
university courses demand more sterling or, 
at least, different, abilities from those de- 
manded by the high school, and that others 
then find opportunity to show what is in 
them, and soon surpass their more precocious 
but less enduring classmates. All this may 
occur in individual cases, but quite the op- 
posite is the rule. Those who get the best 
start in the high school maintain their 
advantage in the university." 

Of course, a boy may loaf in high school 
and take his chance of being the one excep- 
tion among five hundred. But he would 
hardly be taking a sporting chance; it 
would be rather a fool's chance. The risk 
would be less in going over Niagara Falls in 
a barrel. 

The University of Chicago found that high- 
school students who failed to attain an 
average rank higher than the passing mark, 
by at least £5 per cent, of the difference 
between that passing mark and one hun- 

25 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

dred, failed in their university classes. The 
faculty therefore decided not to admit 
such students. Exceptions were made of 
the most meritorious cases, but few of these 
exceptions made satisfactory records in the 
university. 

At Columbia University, in recent years, 
the grades attained in entrance examinations 
have proved important indications of the 
candidates' college careers. Of the men en- 
tering in 1912, for example, the first in the 
entrance records held his place in the col- 
lege, and nine of the first ten remained 
in the first ten throughout the freshman 
year. A comparison of all the high-school 
grades and all the college grades of the class 
of 1916 at Union College gives an equally 
positive correlation. 

Basing its policy upon such evidence as 
this, Reed College, at the beginning of its 
work, decided to admit, as a rule, only 
students who ranked in the first third of 
their preparatory-school classes. Some ex- 
ceptions were made. Twenty per cent, of 
those admitted were known to be below the 

26 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

first third, and & per cent, below the 
median line. In all cases these candidates 
were regarded as the most promising of those 
who fell below the first third in high-school 
rank, yet almost without exception they have 
failed to rise above the lowest quarter of 
their college classes. Thus, it appears that 
in Oregon, as in Wisconsin and Illinois and 
New York, those who get the best start in 
the lower schools maintain their advantage 
in the upper schools; few of their classmates 
overtake them. 

But why strive for high rank in college? 
Why not wait for the more "practical" 
studies of the professional school? Hundreds 
of boys the country over declare to-day that it 
makes little difference whether they win high 
grades or merely passable grades in the liberal 
arts, since these courses have no definite 
bearing on their intended life-work. Almost 
invariably they are ready to admit that 
they must settle down to serious effort in 
the studies of law, medicine, engineering — 
that is to say, in professional schools. Even 
the sport who makes the grade of mediocrity 

27 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

his highest aim as a college undergraduate, 
fully intends to strive for high scholarship in 
his professional studies. Does he often at- 
tain that aim? That is the question. 

And that, fortunately, is a question we 
may answer with more than opinions. We 
may take, for example, all the students who 
graduated from Harvard College during a 
period of twelve years and entered the 
Harvard Medical School. Of the 239 who 
received no distinction as undergraduates, 
36 per cent, graduated with honor from the 
Medical School. Of the 41 who received 
degrees of A.B. with high honor, more than 
92 per cent, took their medical degrees with 
honor. 

Still more conclusive are the records of 
the graduates of Harvard College who during 
a period of twenty years entered the Harvard 
Law School. Of those who graduated from 
college with no special honor, only QH per 
cent, attained distinction in the Law School. 
Of those who graduated with honor from the 
college, 22 per cent, attained distinction in 
the Law School; of those who graduated 

28 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

with great honor, 40 per cent.; and of those 
who graduated with highest honor, 60 per 
cent. Sixty per cent. ! Bear that figure in 
mind a moment, while we consider the 340 
who entered college "with conditions" — 
that is to say, without having passed all 
their entrance examinations — and graduated 
from college with plain degrees. Of these 
men, not 3 per cent, won honor degrees in 
law. 

If a college undergraduate is ready to be 
honest with himself, he must say, "If I am 
content with mediocre work in college, it is 
likely that the men in my class who graduate 
with honor will have three times my chances 
of success in the Law School, and the men 
who graduate in my class with highest honor 
will have nearly ten times my chances of 
success." So difficult is it for a student to 
change his habits of life after the crucial 
years of college that not one man in twenty 
years — not one man in twenty years — who 
was satisfied in Harvard College with grades 
of "C" and lower gained distinction in the 
studies of the Harvard Law School. 

29 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

The same relation appears to persist be- 
tween the promise of Yale undergraduates 
and their performance in the Harvard Law 
School. If we divide the £50 graduates of 
Yale who received their degrees in law at 
Cambridge between 1900 and 1915 into nine 
groups, according to undergraduate scholar- 
ship, beginning with those who won the high- 
est "Senior Appointments" at Yale and 
ending with those who received no gradua- 
tion honors, we find that the first group did 
the best work in their studies of law, the 
second group next, the third group next, and 
so on, in the same order, with but a single 
exception, to the bottom of the list. The 
performance at Harvard, of each of the eight 
groups of Yale honor graduates, was in precise 
accordance with the promise of their records 
at Yale. 

Apparently the "good fellow" in college, 
the sport who does not let his studies interfere 
with his education, but who intends to settle 
down to hard work later on, and who later 
on actually does completely change his habits 
of life, is almost a myth. At least his record 

30 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

does not appear among those of thousands of 
students whose careers have been investi- 
gated under the direction of President Lowell 
and others. It seems that results are legal 
tender, but you cannot cash in good inten- 
tions. 

"Dignified credit to all," cries the bill- 
board. "Enjoy your new suit now, and pay 
for it later." Many a boy, lured by the in- 
stalment plan, expects to get an education on 
deferred payments in effort, only to find that 
there is no credit for him, dignified or other- 
wise. What his honest effort has paid for in 
full is his to-day; nothing more by any 
chance whatever. 



SUCCESS IN STUDIES AND IN LIFE 

BUT why strive for the highest standing 
in professional school? Let us pursue 
the inquiry one step further. Let us ask 
whether success in studies gives promise of 
success in life. As far as the study of law is 
concerned, we may answer at once that the 
known success of the honor graduates of the 
Harvard Law School is one reason why even 
college undergraduates at Cambridge believe 
that law students should study law — hard 
and seriously. For the same reason, lead- 
ing law-offices the country over give prefer- 
ence to honor graduates of law-schools. 

But what is success in life? That is the 
first problem. It is one difficulty that con- 
fronts every one who attempts to speak with 
certainty about the meaning of education. 

32 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

There is no accepted definition of the aim of 
education. The philosopher has been likened 
to a blind man in a dark cellar hunting for a 
black cat that isn't there. The aim of educa- 
tion seems as elusive as the proverbial black 
cat. 

Nevertheless, we do not close our schools. 
We strive for concrete ends, such as pro- 
ficiency in handwriting, aware that any 
particular end may soon be regarded as not 
worth the effort to attain it. Until recently 
we could not say even what we meant by pro- 
ficiency in handwriting, for we had not at- 
tempted to define our aim or devise a measure 
of our progress toward it. We still speak 
of educational processes and results about as 
accurately as the Indians spoke of tempera- 
ture. We still speak of the science of educa- 
tion without seeming to understand that 
there is no science without precise measure- 
ment. From our fragmentary beginnings to 
an adequate science of education is a long 
journey, and the road is beset with difficulties. 
While we struggle along this road, genera- 
tions will come and go. We will help them 

33 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

to attain what seem, for the time, the proper 
aims of education. And each individual will 
strive for what seems to him success in life. 

As one measure of success in life, we may 
take the judgment of certain men. In so 
far as we accept their judgment our findings 
concerning the relation between college stud- 
ies and this kind of success will seem im- 
portant to us. Here, as in most questions 
of educational aim, we can do no better for 
the present than take the consensus of 
opinion of competent judges. 

Using this measure for success, I endeav- 
ored to find out whether the members of the 
class of 1894 of Harvard College who had 
become notable in their life-work had been 
notable in their studies. I therefore asked 
three judges to select, independently, the 
most successful men from that class. I chose 
as judges the dean of the college, the secretary 
of the Alumni Association, and a professor 
in Columbia University who is a member of 
the class, because I thought that these men 
came nearer than any others to knowing all 
members of the class. I left each judge free 

34 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

to use his own definition of success, but I 
asked them not to select men whose achieve- 
ments appeared to be due principally to fam- 
ily wealth or position. The judges agreed 
in naming twenty-three successful men. I 
then had the entire undergraduate records 
of these men accurately copied from the 
college records and compared with the stand- 
ing of twenty-three men chosen at random 
from the same class. 

The result was striking. The men who 
were thus named as most successful attained 
in their college studies nearly four times as 
many highest grades as the random selection. 
To the credit of the successful men are 196 
"A's"; to the credit of the other men, only 
56. 

Following a similar plan, three judges 
selected the most successful men among the 
graduates of the first twenty -four (1878-1901) 
classes from the University of Oregon. An 
examination of the scholarship records of 
these men showed that 53 per cent, had been 
good students and 17 per cent, had been 
weak students. Of the graduates who were 

35 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

not regarded as successful, 52 per cent, had 
been weak students and only 12 per cent, had 
been good students. 

Similar results have been found by Prof. 
A. A. Potter, Dean of the Kansas State 
Agricultural College, in an unpublished study 
of the relationship between superiority in 
undergraduate scholarship and success in the 
practice of engineering as indicated by sal- 
aries received. The director of the School 
of Forestry of Yale University has collected 
evidence of the same kind in an unpublished 
study of the graduates of the Yale School 
of Forestry. It appears that about 90 
per cent, of the men who have had con- 
spicuous success in the field of forestry were 
among the better students in their profes- 
sional studies. Dean Sills of Bowdoin Col- 
lege has made a long list of famous graduates 
of Bowdoin and shown that their scholarship 
records were, as a rule, noteworthy. The 
graduates of West Point — General Grant to 
the contrary notwithstanding — follow the 
same general rule: high scholarship at the 
academy is the safest single criterion of 

36 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

success in the Army. President Thwing of 
Western Reserve University, the historian of 
higher education in America, says that he has 
found no exception, in the records of any 
American college, to the general rule that 
those who achieve most before graduation 
are likely to achieve most after graduation. 

The list of the first ten scholars of each of 
the classes that graduated from Harvard 
College in the sixth decade of the last cen- 
tury, as presented by William Roscoe Thayer, 
is a list of men eminent in every walk of life. 
Indeed, it is likely that the first quarter in 
scholarship of any school or college class will 
give to the world as many distinguished men 
as the other three-quarters. 

What can we say in this connection of the 
420 living graduates of the ten Wesleyan 
University classes from 1890 to 1899? Just 
this: Of the men in that group who gradu- 
ated with highest honors, 60 per cent, are 
now regarded as distinguished either by 
Who's Who in America or by the judgment 
of their classmates; of those who were elected 
to Phi Beta Kappa — the scholarship honor 

37 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

society — SO per cent.; of those who won no 
superior honors in scholarship, only 11 per 
cent. Of the men now living who graduated 
from Wesley an University between 1860 and 
1889, 10 per cent, are listed in Who's Who: 
of those who received high honors in scholar- 
ship during this period, 50 per cent.; of 
those who attained no distinction as scholars, 
only 10 per cent. 

In the course of a careful treatment of this 
subject Professor Nicholson says : 

"Turning now to a comparison of honors 
achieved in college and after graduation, and 
considering first the middle group of gradu- 
ates, the classes of 1860 to 1889, we find that 
one in six of the living are mentioned in 
Who's Who (100 out of 604). During this 
period 59 men received high honors at 
graduation; of this number £8, just about 
one-half, are mentioned in Who's Who. 
Of the 185 elected by Phi Beta Kappa during 
the same period, the names of 58, approxi- 
mately one-third, are found in the book. 
And of the 419 who graduated without dis- 
tinction, only 42, about one-tenth, have 

38 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

achieved success in later life, if Who's Who 
is a fair guide. 

"Let us see whether these figures concern- 
ing the most representative body of gradu- 
ates, the thirty middle classes, apply equal- 
ly well to the later and earlier graduates. 
The graduates in the first twenty-seven 
classes, down to 1859, numbered 643, of 
whom 53 were appointed valedictorians or 
salutatorians. In the judgment of the writer, 
supported by that of other members of the 
faculty, 26 of these high-honor men, just one- 
half, would have appeared in Who's Who 
had such a book been published when they 
were living. Their careers, as outlined in 
the Alumni Record, clearly entitle them to 
the claim of distinction. The same judges 
chose 52 of the 167 Phi Beta Kappa men of 
the period as men of distinction, again not 
far from one-third. Of the 476 not in Phi 
Beta Kappa, only 29 could fairly be called 
distinguished, which is only about 6 per 
cent" 

From the records of 1,667 graduates of 
Wesleyan University, Professor Nicholson 

39 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

concludes that of the highest-honor graduates 
(the two or three leading scholars of each 
class) one out of two will become distin- 
guished; of Phi Beta Kappa men, one out of 
three; of the rest, one out of ten. 

Concerning the value of Who's Who as a 
criterion of success in life, we may say at 
least this, that it is a genuine effort, un- 
warped by commercial motives, to include 
the men and women who have achieved most 
worthy leadership in all reputable walks of 
life. Whatever flaws it may have, it is 
acknowledged to be the best list of names for 
such uses as we are now making of it; and 
it is probable that such changes in the list 
as any group of competent judges might 
make would not materially affect the general 
conclusions we have drawn. 

Further proof of the relation between 
scholarship and success in life was found by 
Prof. E. G. Dexter. He compared the 
records, before and after graduation, of the 
men of twenty-two colleges. Of all the 
living graduates of these colleges, he found 

40 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

about £ per cent, in Who's Who; of the honor 
scholars, he found 5.9 per cent. It thus ap- 
pears that the chances of this kind of success 
in life of a good student are about three 
times the chances of students selected at 
random. Looking at the records in still 
another way, we may observe that about 
15 per cent, of all graduates are Phi Beta 
Kappa men. If rank in college has nothing 
to do with success in life, we should expect 
to find that 15 per cent, of the graduates in 
Who's Who were Phi Beta Kappa men. 
But they surpass this expectancy by nearly 
100 per cent. 

In even larger measure have the very high- 
est scholars fulfilled the promise of their 
college years. Of the Yale valedictorians, 
56 per cent, are included in Who's Who. 
That is to say, a man at the head of his class 
appears to have more than twenty-five times 
as many chances of distinction as the man 
selected at random from among his class- 
mates. 

Again, of the 13,705 living alumni of two 
of the larger New England colleges, 5.4 per 

41 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

cent, of those who graduated in the first 
tenth of their classes are included in Who's 
Who, and only 1.8 per cent, of those who 
graduated in the fourth tenth. With due 
allowance for the defects of the measures of 
success here employed, the figures tend 
strongly to corroborate the conclusions of all 
other studies. The success of the under- 
graduate in his formal intellectual education 
is the safest single measure — though not the 
only measure — of the success he is likely to 
achieve in later life. 

This is the only country, as President 
Lowell has observed, where it is popularly 
believed that superior diligence and aptitude 
for knowledge are poor preparations for suc- 
cess in life. It is well known that the uni- 
versities of England and the English people 
generally have much more respect for scholar- 
ship than is common in the United States. 
One reason is doubtless the eminence for 
centuries in the Old World of leading uni- 
versity scholars. Of the 384 Oxford Uni- 
versity men called to the bar before 1865, 
46 per cent, of those who received first-class 

42 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

honors at Oxford subsequently attained dis- 
tinction in the practice of law, as indicated 
by the offices they held. Of the men who 
were content with pass degrees, only 16 per 
cent, attained distinction. The list follows: 

Of the 92 who received first-class honors, 

46 per cent, attained distinction. 
Of the 85 who received second-class honors, 

33 per cent, attained distinction. 
Of the 67 who received third-class honors, 

22 per cent, attained distinction. 
Of the 61 who received fourth-class honors, 

20 per cent, attained distinction. 
Of the 271 who received pass-degree honors, 

16 per cent, attained distinction. 
Of the 58 who received no degrees, 

15 per cent, attained distinction. 

No student who fell below the second 
group of scholars at Oxford attained a 
political distinction of the highest class. 

A similar correlation is found between the 
degree of success of undergraduates at Oxford 
and their subsequent distinction as clergy- 
men. 

Of the first-class men, 

68 per cent, attained distinction. 

Of the second-class men, 
37 per cent, attained distinction. 

43 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

Of the third-class men, 

32 per cent, attained distinction. 
Of the fourth-class men, 

29 per cent, attained distinction. 
Of the pass-degree men, 

21 per cent, attained distinction. 
Of the no-degree men, 

9 per cent, attained distinction. 

Success in the Oxford final schools is thus 
seen to give fairly definite promise of success 
at the bar and in the church. An extensive 
study of the careers of Oxford men led Edgar 
Schuster, of the University of London, to con- 
clude that any selection based on the results 
of a fairly searching examination of men at 
the age of twenty-one to twenty-three would 
probably be, on the whole, a judicious one. 
In very truth, the boy is father of the man. 

A knowledge of all these facts will hardly 
make thinking as popular as a motion- 
picture show, but it ought to silence some of 
those who seek to excuse their mental sloth 
on the ground that it doesn't matter. 

Perhaps that is too great a hope. After 
some of these comments concerning the at- 
titude of students toward scholarship and 

44 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

some of these statistics had been published 
in Harper's Magazine, many people declared 
that students surely would not belittle the 
achievements of the scholar if they could see 
such conclusive evidence. Yet the student 
editors of the Harvard Illustrated Magazine, 
after reading the evidence and presenting 
what purported to be a summary of the 
statistics, made the following comment: 
"We do decry such puerile, silly doctrine. . . . 
Not so many years ago one of the best poets 
Harvard ever had was expelled from college 
because he spent his time working at his 
interest, the passion of his art, instead of 
listening to a few moss-back professors re- 
peat lectures twelve years old." 

It may be objected that all these statis- 
tics cover only those kinds of success that 
achieve publicity. Are there not men and 
women doing worthy work in comparative 
obscurity who should be regarded as suc- 
cessful? Certainly there are, many thou- 
sands of them. For obvious reasons, no 
statistics are available concerning them: all 
we can say is that we have every reason to 

45 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

suppose that they are not exceptions to the 
general rule that the superior service of cer- 
tain citizens of any community will be found 
to be correlated with superior scholarship in 
earlier life. 



VI 

GENIUS AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR STUDY 

"T SUPPOSE all this is intended to spur 
JL me to greater effort," says the student 
of mediocre record. "What is the use? I 
am no genius." 

No more are most men who are called 
successful. Genius has been defined as "an 
infinite capacity for taking pains." Edison 
has put the matter more epigrammatically, 
if not more elegantly, in calling genius 1 
per cent, inspiration and 99 per cent, 
perspiration. Neither definition is adequate. 
What the world calls genius has never 
been accounted for solely by hard work. If 
both inspiration and perspiration are neces- 
sary for success, it is nonsense to ask which 
is more important. They have no common 
measure. We do not venture to say whether 

47 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

sodium or chlorine is the more important 
element of salt. 

The purpose of these definitions is to stress 
the fact that the advantage of men and 
women who are accounted successful over all 
others is seldom genius; the difference is due 
not so much to native endowment of vision, 
imagination, and brilliance of mind as to in- 
dustrious persistence in the pursuit of definite 
aims. The prancing race-horse makes a spec- 
tacular appearance, but he fails you in the 
long run. He is all speed and no control — 
useless for a steady job. 

We do not mean to say that any man, by 
taking thought and keeping at it, can add 
enough cubits to his stature to become a 
Chopin, or a Shelley, or a Pasteur, or — we 
should add — even an Edison, great as is his 
capacity for taking pains and his tireless in- 
dustry. What we do mean to say is that the 
genius of such men is enjoyed by exceedingly 
few of the men and women who are regard- 
ed by the world as highly successful. Mr. 
Roosevelt, for example, can hardly be called 
a genius. He himself insists that all he has 

48 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

accomplished is due to dogged persistence and 
a capacity for hard work. Without these 
qualities, not a human being — genius or no 
genius — has ever attained a great success. 
All the "just-as-good-as" men have not yet 
found a substitute for hard work. 

Between Galileo, Goethe, Mendelssohn, and 
the rank and file of men there appears to be a 
hopeless difference of endowment; but be- 
tween the large body of fairly successful men 
and the larger body of less successful men 
the determining difference appears to be the 
degree and persistence of effort. No one 
need be a genius to improve his standing 
in these respects. 

In fact, the boy who is not a genius and 
who knows it, who expects to gain nothing 
easily, and who early forms the habit of 
striving to do his best, has far better chances 
of ultimate success than the boy of brilliant 
parts who easily surpasses him in school 
without half trying, and who thus gets used 
to giving less than his best. 

Most of our schools and colleges in America 
are inadequate challenges to youth of su- 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

perior talents. Such youth are, therefore, in 
greater danger than their companions of 
moderate ability, for whom our institutions 
are primarily conducted. If we took as 
solicitous care of the 5 per cent, of the 
abnormally brilliant as we do of the 5 per 
cent, of the abnormally dull, we would not 
retard the superior students with standards 
of mediocrity. We would require them to do 
their best, regardless of the "standards" of 
the school. "The worst fault," says Pro- 
fessor Canby, "into which our age-long ser- 
vice of mediocrity has led us is a weak- 
kneed, pusillanimous deference to mediocrity 
itself. The college has borrowed the vice 
from every-day American life." For a boy 
of sound health and really superior parts to 
spend four years in meeting the usual, act- 
ually required "requirements" of a "stand- 
ard high school" or of a "standard college" 
is pretty hard on the boy. However great 
the promise of youth, it is not likely to be- 
come the performance of manhood if the 
candidate habitually falls short of the pos- 
sible performances of youth. 

50 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

Exceptions that Test the Rule 

There are evidently other exceptions to 
the rule that the promise of youth becomes 
the performance of manhood. These ex- 
ceptions are doubtless due in part to the fact 
that our unscientific methods of grading 
sometimes record the passing moods or the 
permanent idiosyncrasies of teachers as well 
as the achievements of students. School 
marks are not always what they seem to be. 
Professor Jones gives a boy 78 per cent, in 
history. Seventy-eight per cent, of what? 
Nobody knows. Definite per cents, of un- 
defined quantities deceive us by the ap- 
pearance of exactness. Professor Black gives 
another boy 98 per cent, in Latin. Ninety- 
three per cent, of what? We can only 
guess. 

Much worse for our present purposes is 
the fact that we have no means of comparing 
the work of the two boys. Whether attain- 
ing a grade of 78 in history is more or less of a 
triumph than attaining a grade of 93 in 
Latin, we do not know. In certain institu- 

51 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

tions with which we are familiar we think 
we do know; but the large bodies of statistics 
here used as evidence are necessarily taken 
at face value. The shortcomings of our 
methods of marking students, until recently 
in almost universal use, surely account for 
some of the cases in which academic distinc- 
tion has not led to corresponding distinction 
in later life. 

Other cases are due to the sudden appear- 
ance in later life of more powerful impulses 
for work than those of school years. A boy 
who has sauntered along the primrose paths 
of college life contrives to graduate. Sud- 
denly he faces death, or loses his property, or 
falls in love, or goes to war, and forthwith he 
is as a man born again. Inheritance, which 
always preponderates over environment, now 
forms an alliance with incentive. Traits 
which, with adequate motives, would have 
won their way to class honors are now put to 
hard work. Success comes! And lo, how 
many nimble minds there are to jump from a 
single case to the generalization that studies 
do not count. 

52 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUfiY? 

Yes, there are exceptions. As a college 
undergraduate, you have as much right as 
any man to count on being one of them, 
and it is the most comforting thought you 
can cherish. Of course the law of chance is 
overwhelmingly against you; but all courts 
are notoriously slow in dealing out justice. 
While you wait, nobody can prove that you 
are not an exception, and you can rest secure 
in the belief that the law can never catch you. 
Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow you 
do not expect to die. 

There is another group of students to whom 
we should here pay our respects — those who 
drop out before graduation. The Com- 
mencement program is not as respectful to 
them as a newspaper in reporting a horse- 
race; it does not even mention the fact that 
they "also ran." Yet many of them assure 
us that they could do well in their studies if 
they cared to take the trouble. What 
shall we say to them? Chiefly this: that 
"not caring to take the trouble" is itself an 
alarming symptom. Ability without the 
disposition to use it is like gasoline without 

53 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

a spark. It wins no races. It would seem 
that dropping out of college not only implies 
a predisposition to drop out of every race 
before the finish, but as well a smaller chance 
of life itself. Of five Harvard classes, twenty- 
five years after graduation, only 15 per cent, 
of those who had graduated were dead, and 
32 per cent, of those who dropped out before 
graduating. 

It is true that some colleges are so loosely 
put together that a student can loaf until the 
last week of the term and then scrape 
through by a kind of death-bed repentance. 
Not so in the severer trials of life beyond the 
campus. "In the moral world," as Charles 
R. Brown puts it, "a man is judged not by the 
few holy emotions he can scramble together 
in the last fifteen minutes of earthly exist- 
ence; he is judged by the whole trend and 
drift of his life." And this is just. What 
a man is content to be, day after day, when 
all runs smoothly, that, in all probability, 
he will find himself to be when a crisis comes. 
It is evident that no man in a responsible 
position can meet a crisis safely with the 

54 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

kind of effort that in college brings the grade 
of mediocrity. 

"Luck Beats Science Every Time" 

In much that I have said about success I 
have used the mathematical term "chance," 
a term as far removed as any term could be 
from the popular notion of luck. If all these 
studies prove anything, they prove that there 
is a long chain of causal connections binding 
together the achievements of a man's life 
and explaining the success of a given moment. 
That is the non-skid chain that keeps him 
safe in slippery places. Luck is about as 
likely to strike a man as lightning, and about 
as likely to do him any good. The best 
luck a young man can have is the firm con- 
viction that there is no such thing as luck, 
and that he will gain in life just about what 
he deserves, and no more. The man who is 
waiting around for something lucky to turn 
up has time to see a preparedness parade pass 
by him — the procession of those who have 
formed the habit of turning things up. In a 
saloon at a prairie station in Montana I saw 

55 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

the sign, "Luck beats science every time." 
That is the motto of the gambler — in the 
saloon and in the class-room. But all men 
who have won durable distinction are proof 
that science beats luck — science operating 
through the laws of heredity and habit. 

Even fathers who have proved all this in 
their own lives are loath to try it on their 
sons. "What I most enjoy," says Doctor 
Crothers, "is to experiment with a successful 
self-made man. He is an easy mark and will 
pay liberally for an educational gold brick. 
He has made his own way in the world by 
force of ability and hard work. But when it 
comes to his son, he is the most credulous 
creature alive. He is ready to believe that 
something can be had for nothing. When 
he sends his son to college the last thing he 
thinks of is that the lad will have to work for 
all that he gets. He has an idea that a 
miracle of some kind is about to be per- 
formed in the enchanted castle of the Liberal 
Arts. The boy will have all sorts of things 
done for him. He will get mental discipline, 
which is a fine thing to have. Certain studies 

56 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

are rich in discipline. If he doesn't elect 
these disciplinary studies he will doubtless 
get all the mental discipline he needs by 
living in the same town with a number of 
hard-working professors. Every college which 
has been a long time on the same spot has 
ideals. The youth is supposed to get these 
ideals, though he is unconscious of them at the 
time. In after-years they will be explained 
to him at the class reunions and he will be 
glad that he absorbed them. Toward the 
end of his college course he will show signs 
of superiority to his parents, and there will be 
symptoms of world- weariness. He will be 
inclined to think that nothing is quite worth 
while. That tired feeling is diagnosed as 
'Culture.'" 



VII 

THINKING BY PROXY 

IF we may trust the general conclusions 
from which this fragmentary evidence ap- 
pears to allow no escape, we shall have to 
regard a quickening of intellectual enthusiasm 
as the first need of college students. 

An undergraduate, writing his "Confes- 
sion" in the Outlook, admits that he knows 
of a few students with a zeal for knowledge 
so intense that not even a college course can 
quench it; but everything, he says, "unites 
to extinguish it — the quality of the instruc- 
tion, the lack of any demand for scholarship, 
and, above all, the alluring ease of the 
environment." 

However misleading may be the remarks of 
this undergraduate, or those of Mr. Dooley, 
as to details, both of these amiable critics 

58 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

have hit upon the chief weakness of the 
American college: our students have too 
much done for them and too little required of 
them. Mr. Dooley says that, nowadays, 
when a lad goes to college, "the prisidint 
takes him into a Turkish room, gives him 
a cigareet, an' says, 'Me dear boy, what 
special branch of larnin' w'u'd ye like 
to have studied f'r ye be our compitint 
profissors?'" 

Our students are not to be blamed for 
their attitude toward scholarship. Our schools 
have developed it. Our competent professors 
— aided and abetted by lecture systems, and 
tutors, and writers of text-books, and dis- 
tributors of printed notes — do too much 
thinking for college students — keep them 
too long on diluted diets of predigested food. 
Our students, like our infant industries under 
the motherly policy of protection, are coddled 
long after they are able to stand on their own 
feet. And until a boy has once had the ex- 
hilarating adventure of standing, even with 
shaking knees, on his own feet intellectually 
he does not know what college is all about. It 

59 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

is no wonder that the incidental amusements 
seem to him most vital. 

You can lead a boy to lectures, but you 
cannot make him think — at least, not often 
by this, the easiest of all methods of instruc- 
tion. It is possible for a student to graduate 
from almost any college without an origi- 
nal idea in his head. If he will give back to 
his professors what they have given him in 
lectures and in prescribed books he may don a 
cap and gown and receive a degree. The 
highest grade, it is true, is reserved in some 
colleges for those who show independence of 
thought (which is almost enough to account 
for the positive correlations we have found 
everywhere between highest grades in col- 
lege and highest success afterward) ; but the 
"gentleman's grade" is still the badge of 
mediocrity which many present as their sole 
passport. I have known students to pass 
courses in mathematics and formal logic by 
memorizing selected pages, without the 
vaguest idea of what it all meant. 

When a student has to write on any sub- 
ject his first idea, as a rule, is to look it up in a 

60 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

book. The college girl who, when asked to 
write a description of a sunset, applied to the 
librarian at once for a book on sunsets, was 
following the usual method. When students 
undertake to prepare for a debate and cannot 
find an argument in the library, all put to- 
gether, they usually want to change the sub- 
ject. Another substitute for thinking is 
suggested by a letter I received the other day 
which read: 

"Dear Sir, — I have been chosen for our 
champion State debate on Government 
ownership of railroads. Please send me six 
points on the affirmative. Thanking you in 
advance, Yours truly." 

Even the thesis required of a candidate 
for the degree of doctor of philosophy, which 
is supposed to be original work, does not 
always reveal original thinking. Some of 
these theses are no less mechanical and no 
more valuable than the accounts a bank clerk 
winds out of his calculating-machine. In 
many colleges boys are virtually required to 
support their teams, turn up their trousers, 
choose their companions, and walk across the 

61 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

campus according to tradition. Such courses 
might better be elective; but thinking should 
be compulsory. 

For a number of years I had young gradu- 
ates of a number of theological schools in my 
classes in argumentation. They were dif- 
ficult to teach because, in many cases, they 
appeared to have acquired fluency of speech 
without the habit of thought. They did not 
distinguish between assertion and evidence. 
As preachers they had become accustomed 
to assert what they pleased, with no one to 
answer back — a dangerous experience for any 
one, prince or pauper, pope or prelate. They 
appeared to be disciples of the author of a 
text-book on "Oratory" for young preachers 
who recommends his own method, as follows: 
"I went to my room, locked the door, placed 
the Bible before me on the mantel, opened it 
at random, and then on whatever passage 
my eye chanced to rest, proceeded to give a 
discourse of ten minutes. ... At first I 
found it very difficult to speak so long right 
to the point. But then, if I couldn't talk on 
the subject, I would talk about it — making 

62 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

good remarks and moral reflections — being 
careful to keep up the flow, and say some- 
thing to the end of the term allotted for 
the exercise." 

Intellectual Enthusiasm and Headaches 

Not all the blame for present conditions 
should be laid to parents and alumni. They, 
too, are the products of our own teaching. 
The traditional conservatism of colleges is not 
stimulating to thought. New ideas disturb 
the academic calm. The teacher is most 
comfortable who stays in the beaten path, 
teaching what he was taught and teaching 
it in the same way. Unless the teacher takes 
resolute measures to resist the deadening in- 
fluences of his position, his thinking is in 
danger of confinement to a small and dimin- 
ishing circle. This is the danger implied in 
the saying that every occupation has its 
disease: painters have painters' colic, plumb- 
ers have lead poisoning, and college professors 
have the academic mind. The non-con- 
formist gets into trouble. Woodrow Wilson, 
as president of a university, had too many 

63 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

new ideas. He made men think about 
questions which they preferred to regard as 
settled once and for all. 

Certain professors have been refused re- 
election by several universities, apparently 
because they set their students to thinking 
in ways objectionable to the trustees. It 
would be well if more teachers were dis- 
missed because they fail to stimulate think- 
ing of any kind. We can afford to forgive a 
professor what we regard as the occasional 
error of his doctrine, especially as we may be 
wrong, provided he is a contagious center of 
intellectual enthusiasm. It is better for 
students to think about heresies than not to 
think at all; better for them to climb new 
trails, and stumble over error if need be, 
than to ride forever in upholstered ease on 
the crowded highway. It is a primary duty 
of a teacher to make a student take an hon- 
est account of his stock of ideas, throw out 
the dead matter, place revised price marks 
on what is left, and try to fill his empty 
shelves with new goods. 

The "undergraduate" does well to com- 

64 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

plain of the "alluring ease of the environ- 
ment," for the growing tendency toward 
luxurious living is one cause of the wane of 
intellectual enthusiasm among college stu- 
dents. The New England colleges one hun- 
dred years ago provided a better environment 
for study than they provide for all their 
students to-day, and the most magnificent of 
modern graduate schools has yet to show 
whether it will prove more stimulating to 
scholarship than the humblest college of a 
generation ago. 

Even the large universities of our frontier 
States have increasing numbers of boys who 
appear to have lost the power of walking 
from one college building to another. The 
freshman, stretched out in a barber's chair, 
with one man working at his head, another 
at his feet, and a woman at his hands, often 
acts as though he expected to have his mind 
taken care of with as little effort on his part. 

College fraternities, on the whole, have 
made matters worse. Even their efforts in 
recent years to prod their delinquent mem- 
bers seem to be prompted by other than in- 

65 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

tellectual interests. The history of frater- 
nity houses at some colleges is a record of 
organized competition in luxury, usually 
maintained on borrowed money. 

Another obstacle to intellectual enthusiasm 
is the dominance of intercollegiate athletics. 
Out-of-doors games should provide recreation 
as a preparation for study rather than as a 
substitute for study. But, intercollegiate 
athletics having won supremacy, students do 
not tolerate conflicting interests. Their own 
publications, the country over, if distribution 
of space is a true criterion, indicate that they 
regard intercollegiate athletics as more im- 
portant than the combined offerings of art, 
music, literature, social service, politics, 
philosophy, and religion. This excessive in- 
terest in athletics by proxy is antagonistic to 
scholarly ambitions and to the cultivation of 
habits of sustained thinking. 

Without habits of this kind students are 
not likely to find their way to religious founda- 
tions. No great truth comes without lasting 
incentives for the pursuit of truth. Tran- 
sient and secondary interests in thinking 

66 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

will not suffice. Many college students who 
think a little about religion find the experi- 
ence overwhelming. Encountering doubts 
concerning certain beliefs which they had 
once accepted without question as essentials 
of religion, they are inclined to give up every- 
thing rather than make the effort necessary 
to achieve new religious convictions. It is 
easier to have no convictions. Almost any\ 
course is easier for the young people of our 
time than staying with their difficulties, and 
bearing the birth-pains of new ideas, until 
they have builded their own durable bases of 
faith. For them a little thinking is a danger- 
ous thing. They must come to feel the zest 
of the struggle — the keen joy of studying 
their way through — until they can say with 
Mrs. Browning, "If heads that think must 
ache, perforce, then I choose headaches." 

"Let Well Enough Alone'" 

The undergraduate who is really eager to 
excel in any life-work, and who is brave 
enough to face the facts, will take down that 
sign from the walls of his room, "Do not let 

67 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

your studies interfere with your college 
education," and replace it with this one: 
"Do not let your College Life interfere with 
your life's ambition." The boy without am- 
bition will take for his motto, "Let well 
enough alone," oblivious to the fact that 
people who are content to let well enough 
alone rarely do well enough. 

At a convention of teachers not long ago 
a speaker ridiculed a German boy who, upon 
failing in a recitation, put his head upon his 
desk and cried. He said he had never seen 
such a boy in the schools of this country. He 
might have added that in this country we 
do have the spectacle of boys, grown almost 
to manhood, coming off the gridiron crying 
because they have lost a game. If boys must 
cry, the German student apparently chose 
the better time, for nothing seems to promise 
failure in the tasks of to-morrow with greater 
certainty than failure in the studies of to-day, 
whereas the most passionate champions of 
intercollegiate athletics have never presented 
evidence of correlation between winning 
games in college and winning success in life. 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

In reply to this statement, an enterprising 
writer has presented, under the title of Pig- 
skin Chasers in the Game of Life, a list of 
ninety football-players who are said to have 
attained prominence in various careers. This 
list has been published in scores of news- 
papers as sufficient proof of correlation be- 
tween winning games in college and winning 
success in life. As an argument, it is beau- 
tiful in its simplicity. It is deficient, how- 
ever, in two respects. First, to make its 
task easier, it substitutes, in the argument 
to which it replies, the phrase "playing 
games" for the phrase "winning games"; 
second, it ignores twenty thousand, more or 
less, of the men who have played on inter- 
collegiate football teams and selects only 
those that serve its own purposes; thus 
naively ignoring both of the real questions at 
issue — namely, the scholarship achievements 
of its successful list of players, in comparison 
with the achievements of all other students, 
and of all other players. If proof were as 
simple a matter as this, it could be shown by 
precisely the same method that there is a 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

correlation between success in life and the 
length of a man's name, or his room number, 
or his date of birth, or any other chance 
event. Nothing is easier than to select only 
those cases that favor one's preconceived 
ideas and leap the gap to a generalization. 
Nevertheless, this newspaper argument — the 
lacking every safeguard of the methods it 
pretends to use — doubtless convinces more 
people than the most rigorously scientific, 
statistical evidence — because it tells them 
what they want to believe to be true. 

As I look back over all my school-days I 
think with deep gratitude of the oldest master 
in the public schools of Boston, whose motto 
was, "One hundred per cent, or zero." Noth- 
ing short of perfection satisfied him. We all 
knew it, and day after day we toed the mark. 

A boy came home from school the other 
day and said to his father, "I got one hundred 
per cent, in school to-day." 

"Did you?" exclaimed the proud father. 
"In what subject?" 

"Oh, I got fifty per cent, in arithmetic and 
fifty per cent, in geography." 

70 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

What that kind of one hundred per cent, 
promises for the future can be predicted with 
little chance of error. 

"A college professor/' said a senior in his 
Commencement part, "is a man greatly be- 
loved by his students — after they graduate." 
A wise teacher knows that he can afford to 
wait many years for the verdicts of his 
students; a wise student knows that he can- 
not afford to wait; he must choose the hard- 
est taskmasters now. Among teachers the 
greatest number of criminals are not those 
who kill their young charges with overwork, 
but those who allow them to form the habit 
of being satisfied with less than the very 
best there is in them. 

Ruskin had no patience with people who 
talk about "the thoughtlessness of youth" 
indulgently. "I had infinitely rather hear 
of thoughtless old age," he declared, "and 
the indulgence due to that. When a man 
has done his work and nothing can any way 
be materially altered in his fate, let him for- 
get his toil, and jest with his fate, if he will; 

71 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

but what excuse can you find for wilfulness 
of thought at the very time when every 
crisis of future fortune hangs on your de- 
cisions? A youth thoughtless! when all the 
happiness of his home forever depends on 
the chances or the passions of an hour! 
A youth thoughtless! when the career of all 
his days depends on the opportunity of a 
moment. A youth thoughtless! when his 
every act is a foundation-stone of future 
conduct, and every imagination a fountain 
of life or death ! Be thoughtless in any after- 
years, rather than now." 

Now let the student profit by the experi- 
ences of the thousands who have gone before 
and greet his next task with the words of 
Hotspur before the battle of Shrewsbury: 

Oh, gentlemen, the time of life is short; 
To spend that shortness basely were too long, 
If life did ride upon a dial's point, 
Still ending at the arrival of an hour. 



PART II 



VIII 

SHOULD SPECIALISTS SPECIALIZE? 

WHEN a man has made up his mind 
that a student should study, the next 
question is, what should he study? Should 
he plan to become a specialist? If so, should 
he specialize? 

Tolstoy, in his Fables for Children, does not 
tell us whether specialists should specialize, 
but he does tell us about an Indian King 
who ordered all the Blind Men to be as- 
sembled. When they came he ordered that 
all the Elephants be shown to them. The 
Blind Men went to the stable and began to 
feel the Elephants. One felt a leg, another 
a tail, a third the stump of a tail, a fourth 
a belly, a fifth a back, a sixth the ears, a 
seventh the tusks, and an eighth a trunk. 

Then the King called the Blind Men, and 
asked them, "What are my Elephants like?" 

75 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

One Blind Man said, "Your Elephants are 
like posts." He had felt the legs. 

Another Blind Man said, "They are like 
bath-brooms." He had felt the end of the 
tail. 

A third said, "They are like branches." 
He had felt the tail stump. 

The one who had touched the belly said, 
"The Elephants are like a clod of earth." 

The one who had touched the sides said, 
"They are like a wall." 

The one who had touched a back said, 
"They are like a mound." 

The one who had touched the ears said, 
"They are like mortar." 

The one who had touched the tusks said, 
"They are like horns." 

The one who had touched the trunk said 
that they were like a stout rope. 

And all the Blind Men began to dispute 
and to quarrel. 

Hasty Specialists 

Every now and then a Blind Man seeks 
admission to college for the avowed purpose 

76 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

of learning all about an elephant's trunk 
without knowing anything about the ele- 
phant. He objects to taking even a half- 
course on elephants' tusks because he cannot 
see that the subject has any practical con- 
nection with his specialty. Every now and 
then a boy says to his teachers: "I want to 
study English composition. I have been 
told that I have unusual talent as a writ- 
er. I must not waste time. I am already 
eighteen years old. I cannot afford to take 
courses in history and philosophy and science. 
My specialty is writing." It is sometimes 
difficult for such a boy to comprehend fully 
what a great convenience it is, for one 
who wishes to write, to have something to 
say. 

Then there is the man who is ambitious 
to become a public speaker. He does not 
care to study logic and psychology and his- 
tory. Not at all. Those studies may do 
very well for people who have plenty of time 
and no definite aim in life. As for him, he 
wishes to become a public speaker, and there- 
fore he desires only a course in public speak- 

77 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

ing, and that a brief one. Why waste time? 
The alluring man, in the advertising columns 
of the magazine, cries out, "I can make you a 
convincing speaker in fifteen minutes a day." 
As for something to say, have we not been 
assured a thousand times that fifteen minutes 
a day and a five-foot shelf of books are suf- 
ficient for a liberal education? 

One trouble with the hasty specialist is 
that he defeats his own purpose. He cannot 
know all about an elephant's trunk without 
knowing which end it is on and why. He 
cannot be an expert in the care of human 
eyes without first knowing the human body. 
A specialist who is only a specialist is no 
specialist at all. Specialization without a 
broad foundation is a contradiction of 
terms. 

A specialist is supposed to have a thorough 
knowledge of one comparatively small field, 
but he cannot understand one small field ex- 
cept in its manifold relations to other fields. 
The greatest specialists — to use a phrase of 
Doctor Crothers's — "specialize in the hu- 
manities." The greatest colleges — to use a 

78 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

phrase of Matthew Arnold's — help men to 
see life steadily and see it whole. The liberal 
curriculum is designed to furnish every man 
with lasting means and incentives for measur- 
ing the narrowness of his own mind. 

When, by specializing, we mean deliber- 
ately narrowing the scope of one's knowledge 
and appreciation, we mean a kind of concen- 
tration of effort which may prepare for cer- 
tain routine work, directed by other people. 
It cannot prepare for intelligent leadership. 
The kind of specialized preparation which 
means first breadth and eventually leadership 
has no royal short cut. 

Cultural vs. Practical Studies 

Should we, then, choose studies which are 
practical or those which are cultural? Of all 
educational controversies, that is the most fa- 
miliar, the most hotly pursued, and perhaps 
the most futile. The Blind Men in Tolstoy's 
fable disputed and quarreled to no purpose. 
Now, this quarrel is futile because there is no 
such thing as a purely practical subject and 
there is no such thing as a purely cultural 

79 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

subject. The naive division of all studies 
into those which are useful and those which 
are merely ornamental has doomed to con- 
fusion from the start much of our modern 
discussion concerning the relative values 
of vocational high schools and classical high 
schools, of colleges of liberal arts, on the one 
hand, and technical and professional schools, 
on the other hand. 

No subject can be sensibly considered apart 
from the animating purpose of the teacher, 
the attitude of the student, and the dominant 
spirit of the institution. Any subject may 
be partly cultural — dressmaking, for exam- 
ple, and sign-painting and blacksmithing. 
Under certain conditions, for certain persons, 
such studies would be chiefly cultural. Any 
study, on the other hand, may be practical, 
as Latin was in the Middle Ages for every 
one who studied it, and as it is to-day for 
every one who teaches it. To attempt to 
divide the curriculum of lower schools or 
higher schools into practical and cultural 
subjects is to ignore the meaning of speciali- 
zation. 

80 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

It is more illuminating to attempt to 
classify subjects of study as immediately 
practical and ultimately practical, as narrowly 
cultural and broadly cultural. 



IX 

ULTIMATELY PRACTICAL STUDIES 

THE history of the American college cur- 
riculum begins with the Latin, Greek, 
mathematics, and moral philosophy of the 
Harvard College course of 1636, and extends 
through the modern period of demand for ob- 
viously useful studies down to the twentieth- 
century agricultural college with its array of 
courses from weeds to stock- judging, sub- 
tropical pomology, pork production, higher 
basketry, fancy cooking, and business corre- 
spondence. The dominant tendency in Amer- 
ica is toward the "practical." 

What shall we say of this far-reaching mod- 
ern movement to adapt education to the 
immediate needs of all people? What shall 
we say of the teaching of trades to the chil- 
dren of elementary schools? What shall we 

82 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

say of the overshadowing of the remotely 
practical subjects of the secondary-school 
curriculum by immediately practical courses? 
What shall we say of the modest little cata- 
logue of the old college of liberal arts and the 
thousand-page register of the modern uni- 
versity? 

We must say that this trend in education 
is productive of good — indeed, with certain 
qualifications, it is an inevitable and indis- 
pensable gain. The historian of the next 
century, looking back upon our time, will 
wonder at the unaccountable persistence of 
our schools in teaching to 90 per cent, of 
their students some subjects which had for 
them neither immediate nor ultimate prac- 
tical value. 

The new endeavor to bring to the pupils of 
each grade in each city the education which 
school statistics prove that the majority of 
them will immediately need is a hopeful 
tendency; for the stability of a democratic 
community depends in the first instance upon 
the widest possible extension among its 
people of the capacity for productive labor. 

83 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

The average length of a boy's schooling in the 
United States is now less than six years. 
The best we can hope for is a gradual increase 
of this average. Meantime, an immediately 
practical education is a necessity for all 
those whose formal education must be com- 
paratively brief. At the best, few human 
beings have extraordinary intellectual pow- 
ers. The great majority of men and women 
are dependent upon leaders. They must be 
producers in activities that are not too 
exacting. 

This may sound like heresy in a country 
which began its career by declaring that all 
men are born free and equal. Democracy 
has often tried to abolish the hindmost by 
decree, and our schools have long proceeded 
on the assumption that all children are fit for 
abstract forms of higher education. But 
when we face the facts that science ruthlessly 
thrusts before us concerning individual dif- 
ferences among human beings we are forced 
to the conclusion that we need not less, but 
more education of immediately practical 
types. 

84 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

Such education is and will be supported 
at public expense, for a general level of in- 
telligence and efficiency is an obvious and 
a primary need. More vocational education 
will come, and better education, because it 
will be based on quantitative studies of aims, 
needs, and values — of educational processes 
and results, measured with precision. Even in 
school administration, guesses, opinions, and 
prejudices are gradually giving way to science. 

Our public schools will not be overweighted, 
however, with vocational studies, for, in the 
first place, the way ahead must always be 
kept open for exceptional students. Pos- 
sible leaders must not be led into blind alleys. 
In the second place, every man is not only a 
producer, but also a consumer and a citizen. 
Intelligent consumers and intelligent citizens 
are at least as important as efficient producers. 

Education for Leadership 

But a broad table-land of general efficiency 
and intelligence is not enough. A thousand 
pleasant foot-hills will not take the place of 
one Mount Hood. We must have leaders as 

85 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

well as artisans, exceptionally well-equipped 
men in every domain — in literature, in sculpt- 
ure, in painting, in architecture, in music, 
in journalism, in politics, in education, in the 
ministry, in medicine, in statesmanship. A 
thousand lawyers, however true to their 
traditional routine, cannot take the place of 
one William Howard Taft; a thousand teach- 
ers, however conscientious, cannot take the 
place of one Charles William Eliot. We 
must have both the foot-hills and the moun- 
tain peaks, both the followers and the leaders. 
And the power to develop leaders who are 
really superior men is the final test of the 
college as it is of democracy. It is because 
training for leadership is the supreme function 
of the college that so much attention is here 
given to the undergraduate scholarship rec- 
ords of leaders in every domain of human 
aspiration. 

Education for such leadership is no less 
practical than the education of plumbers and 
bookkeepers. That is the gist of the matter. 
In our haste to prepare every boy for a special 
job, let us throw off our blinders — especially 

86 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

those of us who regard ourselves as "prac- 
tical" men. I repeat it: education for such 
leadership is no less 'practical than the educa- 
tion of plumbers and bookkeepers. Yet the 
chief subjects of the liberal curriculum are 
usually called cultural, not useful. History, 
sociology, government, music, fine arts, litera- 
ture, logic, psychology, philosophy, religion, 
and various sciences presented as liberal 
rather than as technical education — mathe- 
matics, biology, physics, chemistry, and as- 
tronomy — these subjects are often condemned 
as impractical. I call them intensely Jprac- 
tical. No subjects, properly pursued, are 
more practical — that is, ultimately practical 
— for the teacher, the jurist, the editor, the 
minister, the banker, the city commissioner, 
the statesman, the legislator, or for the re- 
sponsible heads of hundreds of business en- 
terprises dealing with large numbers of human 
beings. 

Liberal Studies a Practical Investment 

In all the evidence here set forth tending 
to prove that success in scholarship leads to 

87 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

success in later life, no account whatever 
has been taken of the subjects studied. The 
correlation appears to prevail, year in and 
year out, in every part of the country, in 
every type of institution, regardless of the 
individual courses of study. What grade 
of work a boy does in the subjects of his 
choice makes all the difference between 
notable success and comparative failure in 
his life-work; but it does not appear, from 
all our statistics, that it makes much dif- 
ference which subjects a boy elects. 

We should not overlook the fact, however, 
that the college courses of study of the 
thousands of "successful" men included in 
our statistics were virtually devoid of imme- 
diately practical subjects. These men did 
not have the advantages of that modern "col- 
lege" which "offers astrology, aviation, 
Bahaism, bill-collecting, and Esperanto." 
Sixty-two per cent, of the House of Repre- 
sentatives and 68 per cent, of the Senate of 
the United States are college graduates whose 
schooling was chiefly "liberal" rather than 
"practical": from our college graduates — a 

88 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

body of men constituting less than 2 per 
cent, of those eligible for election to Congress 
— we have chosen more than 62 per cent, 
of our national leaders. At one time, not 
long ago, the ranking officer in the United 
States Army, the president of the Senate, the 
speaker of the House of Representatives, and 
the chief justice of the Supreme Court were all 
graduates of one small college of liberal arts 
— Bowdoin. Included in Who's Who in 
America and in Appleton's Cyclopedia of 
American Biography are several hundred 
times as many college graduates as non- 
graduates, in proportion to the total num- 
bers in each group. Evidently, a liberal 
education is for many men a practical in- 
vestment. 

But practical as such liberal studies may 
be in the long stress of a great life-work, 
students may miss their higher values through 
pursuing them for immediate utility. The 
dean of the Agricultural School of a great 
university was urged by professors of litera- 
ture, history, and philosophy to have more 
of these courses for students of agriculture. 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

"Certainly," replied the dean, "we want 
such studies, but make them as practical as 
possible." Immediate and obvious utility he 
had in mind. His answer illustrates the 
weakness of the so-called liberal studies as 
often presented in technical schools. With- 
out the liberal spirit the studies are no longer 
liberal. The direct pursuit of culture, like 
the pursuit of happiness, is a futile quest. 
In college, as elsewhere, he who would find 
his life must lose it, and he who loses his life 
will find life and find it more abundantly. 

Short Cuts to a Liberal Education 

I have contrasted narrowly cultural study 
with broadly cultural study, immediately 
practical education with ultimately practical 
education. The one trains people to meet 
old situations in prescribed ways; the other 
enables men and women to meet new situa- 
tions, analyze them, discover the issues in- 
volved, and develop new solutions in new 
crises. The one may be short; the other is 
necessarily a long preparation. But do we 
rightly condemn any investment because its 

90 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

returns are not immediate? The apple-tree 
is not less useful than the turnip-plant be- 
cause it requires more time and culture. It 
has been well said that a baseball-pitcher 
ripens early, but a Supreme Court justice is 
a rather mature product. 

Preparation for leadership does require 
time. Nowadays people take their pleasure, 
travel, exercise, business, dancing — even mar- 
riage, divorce, and bankruptcy — at high 
speed. Some people expect to acquire an 
education at the same pace. They would 
"make culture hum" as they would boom 
a town. There is a widely published adver- 
tisement that guarantees success to any one 
who will attend a certain business college 
for six months. Correspondence schools un- 
dertake to prepare students for anything so 
quickly that a college course seems a waste of 
time. 

Of late, men have made fortunes in a year 
or two by exploiting chewing-gum, and de- 
facing the landscape with the astounding 
announcement that the gum is round. Who 
can resist buying gum that's round! At 

91 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

the same time chewing-gum types of edu- 
cation have been offered for sale in small 
packages. The buyer soon discovers that 
the flavor is gone, but he can keep up the 
motions until a new kind is offered in a new 
shape and a new wrapper. It is a barren 
year that does not produce a new nostrum 
that will cure anything in ten days, and a 
twin-six-cylinder education that will sur- 
mount all difficulties at top speed. 

Seeing the Whole Elephant 

The early years of the twentieth century 
have made notable advances in professional 
and technical education. Medical schools 
have steadily improved their teaching and 
their equipment. Some of the weakest and 
most pretentious of them have been forced 
to close their doors. Some of our law-schools 
have developed courses of study that are 
broadly educational, not merely preparation 
for the routine practice of law. Agricultural 
colleges have come to their own, and are now 
preparing men for productive activities that 
were, until lately, impossible. The better 

92 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

schools of engineering have made such use 
of modern scientific discoveries that their 
graduates now perform, with certainty of 
success, feats that seemed impossible to the 
previous generation. Schools of dentistry 
and pharmacy, of advertising and household 
arts, of business and commerce, have brought 
their students closer to vocational problems. 
There are technical schools striving to prepare 
for almost every position in life, from pearl- 
diver to aviator, and the aim is always ef- 
ficiency. Their courses are, for the most part, 
immediately practical, and their students, for 
the most part, are bent on acquiring the 
greatest possible amount of obviously useful 
information and experience in the shortest 
possible time. 

But there are careers of vast importance to 
mankind for which all the technical and pro- 
fessional schools of to-day seem to offer no 
broadly valuable preparation. The world 
needs to-day, as it has always needed, minis- 
ters of the gospel with the wisdom, zeal, and 
inspiration of the missionaries of old. The 
world needs to-day, as never before, genuine 

93 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

leadership in the realm of journalism. The 
world needs to-day, more than it yet knows, 
leaders equal to the task of improving human 
life in manifold forms of social service. The 
world needs to-day in commerce, in manu- 
facturing, in banking, in mining, in distribu- 
tion, in transportation, men with a concep- 
tion of the meaning of their enterprises and 
their opportunities far beyond the scope of 
technical preparation. The world needs to- 
day available men and women equal to the 
tasks of leadership in the government of our 
States, or our nation, especially of our cities. 
We have had leaders of great stature in the 
past — prophets, editors, inventors, social re- 
formers, captains of industry, poets, states- 
men — but the greatest of them, in so far as 
they have been prepared for their life-work 
by formal education, have depended, not 
on brief vocational schooling, but on the 
broadly cultural and ultimately practical 
education of the college of liberal arts. Per- 
haps that is why the dean of the leading 
school of technology in America provided 
for his own sons, as a basis for professional 

94 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

and technical studies, a course of four years 
in an old college of liberal arts. Perhaps 
that is why the leading schools of law and of 
medicine and of business administration in 
America make college studies a requirement 
for admission. Again and again men have 
acknowledged the usefulness of their studies 
in technical and professional schools; but 
they have added that it was the broadly 
humanitarian education of the old college 
that inspired them for their life-work and 
enabled them to see it whole. The poor 
Blind Men of the fable could not see the 
whole Elephant: blind specialists have sim- 
ilar troubles. 

Finishing Schools and Beginning Schools 

Liberal education may bring material re- 
wards as a by-product. It usually does, be- 
cause the kind of education that makes a boy 
worth a dollar a week more a year from now 
may make him worth ten dollars a week less 
ten years from now. Vocational schools that 
lead directly to the pay-envelope are "finish- 
ing" schools, since they tend to end the 

95 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

possibilities there. The liberal, ultimately 
practical education — the necessary basis for 
specialization — is the work of a "beginning" 
school. A college of liberal arts, properly 
conceived, is a beginning school, because by 
the time it sends its men and women out to 
take up responsibilities in which they will 
sooner or later become leaders they have just 
caught a glimpse of an alluring upland road 
in the morning glow, leading to fields of hu- 
man service which, but for the college, would 
have been beyond their imagination. That 
is the pregnant thought of the last day of a 
college course: we rightly call that day 
Commencement. It has been well said that 
college graduates, more than any other class 
of men, do what they wish to do, not because 
of inherited wealth or social position, but 
because of the emancipating knowledge of 
opportunity and of self. 

Those who do not comprehend the vital 
significance of the college of liberal arts in 
our national life, those who do not perceive its 
mission outside the scope of professional and 
technical schools and great universities, those 

96 






SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

who have acquired the American habit of 
attempting to estimate educational service 
in terms of numbers of students, extent of de- 
partments, grandeur of buildings, and size of 
salaries, may not understand an institution 
concerned with ultimately practical education 
and therefore content with small numbers. 
Yet training for the highest type of leadership 
is not a wholesale business, is not, in fact, a 
business at all, is personal rather than 
mechanical, and, therefore, has no concern 
with quantitative standards of success. It is 
still true that at a great university a boy may 
go^through more college, but at a small col- 
lege, more college may go through him. 

If all this be true of the old college of 
liberal arts, why these predictions that it will 
be crushed out between the nether millstone 
of the ambitious, immediately practical high 
school and the upper millstone of the am- 
bitious, immediately practical university? 
Why has the dissatisfaction with the old 
college of liberal arts been growing apace? 
Not because we have had too much of liberal 
education: far from it. It is because we 

97 



SHOULD STUDENTS STUDY? 

have had too little of the old college and too 
much of the modern attachments. An ul- 
timately practical education is not a by- 
product of supreme devotion to the imme- 
diately entertaining "outside activities" of 
college life — the elaborately organized hin- 
drances to broadly cultural studies — to 
mental liberation — to "specializing in the 
humanities." 



THE END 



